First of all, why I wanted to move from Apple Mail.app to Microsoft Outlook?
Personally I like Apple Mail.app very much for its simplicity and clean UI. But using it for work has some hick-ups:
- There's at least a minute delay in receiving emails. So when there's a very active conversation happening via email, my response sometimes gets delayed.
- The main problem is that I had to rely on many other internal portals to a) check for availability and room booking, b) view members of a delivery list, c) view a person's contact details.
- Also I like the Lync (MS Communicator) integration in Outlook. I can see if a person is available on Lync before I send any email.
Basically I feel Mail.app is efficient only for emails.
Though I've already decided to move to Outlook.app, I couldn't switch immediately because I had to move my seven years of work emails (> 6GB) properly to Outlook before I start using it actively.
I had serious problem importing the native mailbox (.mbox) file format used by Mail.app. There were a lot of work-arounds I found on the web, but nothing worked perfectly for me. Finally I had almost made up my mind to purchase the software emailchemy, which was recommended by many people for this mail migration. But I was a bit hesitant to spend $50 for a software that I would be using only once.
Then the great google guided me to a Microsoft forum where I found a perfect solution for my problem. Here's how I migrated my emails from Mail.app to Outlook.app
Converting the Mail.app's .mbox packs to the .mbox format that's understandable by MS Outlook
- Download a small app called emlxconvert located here: emlx to mbox
- Your Mail.app mbox folders will be in /Users/<your user name>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes
- Go to that directory in Finder and then search for all .emlx files in that directory.
- Select all the .emlx files in that directory and drag them into the emlxconvert window and click 'Save Mbox'
- After choosing a destination for the .mbox file the email messages are saved as a single .mbox file that can now be imported in to Outlook 2011
Now importing the mbox to Outlook
- In Outlook 2011, go 'File' -> Import -> Select 'Contacts and messages from a text file' and click the right arrow at the bottom of the window.
- In the next step, choose 'Import messages from an MBOX-format text file' and click the right arrow at the bottom of the window.
- Now select the mbox file that we earlier saved using emlxconvert and click 'Import'
- Outlook then will import all your old email in to a folder called mbox. You can then rename the folder or move the emails to a different folder.
